It could be worse.

There are many lies I tell myself but “It could be worse” is the most frequent.

I work in the live event industry and I use this lie many times while working to get through rough spots. There are a lot of rough spots. There seem to be more rough spots post-pandemic.

Equipment not showing up or showing up damaged, labor not showing up or showing up unprepared, and rules that no one could possibly know being enforced. Two of these typically happen on any given event I work on. All three happened on the last one and I just kept having to tell myself, “It could be worse.”

The event in the pictures is not the last show I did. It was a show I did in San Francisco in October of last year. All the gear showed up, the labor was excellent but the building had remarked all the rigging points in the ceiling and they no longer matched what we had on our diagram of the room. “It could be worse.”

That set us a back a couple of hours but because the other two fell into place; we made up the time and everyone went home at a reasonable hour.

“It is what it is,” is also bandied about quite a bit. I know that phrase annoys people but dang it, some time it is what it is.

Maybe I could add a meditative “OM” to to the end of my lie and it would become a new trend in the mindfulness movement. Just imagine a world in which twenty truck loaders and forklift operators are sitting in the siddhasana pose chanting “It could be worse, Ommmmmmmmm,.” while seagulls dig for scraps in nearby dumpsters and diesel fumes fill the air.

Deep breaths everyone.

Thank you for reading.